His first step is removing the donut’s hole, so he selects the clone tool and clones from different areas of the donut to get a random effect with no duplication. Next, to create the bite effect, he clones from the background to remove that section of the donut and roughs out the edges.

This week, Bert walks us through how to create a top secret manila envelope in Photoshop. He begins by creating a new layer called envelope, draws a rectangle, and fills it with a beige color. He then converts this box to black and white, and applies both a cloud and an emboss filter, which creates the paper texture. Lastly, he goes into hue/saturation and colorizes it to achieve a nice beige color.

Last week, Bert showed us how to create a braid pattern and tassel brush that he uses this week on his rising theater curtain illustration. To build the curtain, he selects all but the bottom portion of the screen and fills it with red. Next, he adds the gold braids to the bottom of the curtain by adding a pattern layer and filling it with the braid pattern.

Since he only wants two braids, he selects the top portion of the pattern fill, rasterizes it, and deletes it, leaving the bottom two braids. He then drags them to the proper position on the bottom of the curtain. To create the tassel fringe, he uses the tassel brush and applies an inner glow to give it dimension.

He begins by using the Pen tool to draw a bent line, which he then duplicates and shifts up to make a strand within the braid. Next, he duplicates that form, flips it vertically, and lays it over the first strand to create the braid. To give the stands dimension, he adds a bevel and emboss.

In this week’s Pixel Playground tutorial, Bert shows us how to use the Blend tool in Illustrator to manipulate paths.

His first step is to create one of the vertical slats on the upper portion of the garbage can with the Pen tool, then copy and drag the duplicate to the right. He then bends the top of the left slat outward; this will become the slat farthest to the left.

His first step is to create two versions of the brick wall, a lighter version that appears to be lit from below, and a darker version that appears to be lit from above. Next, he adds a black mask to the light layer, adds a circle to the mask, and fills it in with white. This creates the spotlight, which he then softens with a Gaussian blur.